The invention relates generally to customized design services, and more particularly to customized color selection for a design project.
Color is an expression of human emotion and proper use of color within a room has a significant psychotherapeutic value. For example, color can define human mood (e.g., happy, secure) and self-expression (e.g., unpredictable, comfortable). A decision to choose a color over another color has an emotional context as to why the color was picked. Additionally, color is central to home improvement, workspace, decor, fashion and other design projects.
Color and proper selection of color can be a communication problem between a buyer and a seller within many industries, especially in design services (e.g., customized decor services). For example, assume a buyer wants to paint a dining room wall and a home improvement supplier has an inventory of over 3,500 potential colors for the wall. Although the home improvement supplier can provide samples and technical details for each paint, often the home improvement supplier cannot help the buyer to pick a color that fulfills the buyer's desires for the wall.
One reason for the communications problem between the buyer and the seller is the difficulty of expressing the relationship between human emotions and colors. Most humans are unable to explicitly express their inner emotional needs and desires and translate these variables into a color or a palette of colors. Furthermore, sellers are unable to translate the buyers' self-expression to a cohesive set of colors or a palette of colors. The resulting breakdown in communications results in a prolonged color selection process, misapplication of colors, waste of resources and generally unsatisfactory results for the design project. For example, merchants provide products whose colors do not match a buyer's style and/or emotion.